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Alexander Morley

University of Oxford

Interests

My PhD thesis is centred around how we encode & retrieve memories in the brain, especially in the case where those memories might be highly overlapping in information content but have different emotions associated with them. Outside of neuroscience I think I could sum up most of my interests as involving different ways in which we can use the internet to support communities, rather than exploiting them.

My work

I am currently taking a “break” from med-school to do my PhD in Neuroscience at Oxford. During the course of my PhD I have found myself more and more drawn to the potential of online tools and communities as a way of solving problems. For me, these networks are what the internet was made for, but is currently drifting from.

The networks I am primarily referring to are those that build tools that they share with the world -Open Source, those who are truly engaged in collaborative science -Open Science, and those that understand that information is most powerful when it's shared -Open Data.

Over the course of the fellowship I'm going to be working on three projects that fall under this "network-supporting" umbrella. The first is a web-app that helps walk project leaders through the process of making sure their project/event is as inclusive as possible. You can find it at codeofconduct.io as its current focus is making sure that all events have clear, enforceable Codes of Conduct.

The second is a "simple" community-building exercise for people who use Julia (a new-ish and awesome programming language) for neuroscience. My final project is part of the "Robust Research Initiative", a new working group based at the University of Oxford looking to support the institution in providing training and incentives to enable researchers to do sustainable and reproducible research.